Given the natural
gift of great genius, given the condition of favorable environment, it
yet required an average lifetime and faithful unrelaxing effort to
transform the raw country stripling into a competent ruler for this
great nation.
Almost every success was balanced--sometimes overbalanced by a seeming
failure. Reversing the usual promotion, he went into the Black Hawk War
a captain and, through no fault of his own, came out a private. He rode
to the hostile frontier on horseback, and trudged home on foot. His
store "winked out." His surveyor's compass and chain, with which he was
earning a scanty living, were sold for debt. He was defeated in his
first campaign for the legislature; defeated in his first attempt to be
nominated for Congress; defeated in his application to be appointed
commissioner of the General Land Office; defeated for the Senate in the
Illinois legislature of 1854, when he had forty-five votes to begin
with, by Trumbull, who had only five votes to begin with; defeated in
the legislature of 1858, by an antiquated apportionment, when his joint
debates with Douglas had won him a popular plurality of nearly four
thousand in a Democratic State; defeated in the nomination for
Vice-President on the Fremont ticket in 1856, when a favorable nod from
half a dozen wire-workers would have brought him success.
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